Nothing discouraged, Pizarro and his partners persevered. They had great difficulty in raising money to fit out properly the next expedition, but happily they succeeded in interesting the mayor of Panama. Eighteen months later Pizarro sailed once more with a better equipment and one hundred and sixty men. For five hundred miles he found nothing except the hot and swampy seashore of Colombia, inhabited by miserable naked tribes, and his companions had begun to believe that the empire they were seeking was a myth, when the pilot who had been sent on ahead came back with word that he had penetrated south of the equator, and there had met a sort of large sea-going raft coming from the south manned by a clothed and civilised crew and laden with cloth, silver work, metal mirrors, vases, and various other goods. These Indians said they came from Tumbez, a city in a fertile valley on a dry and penetrable coast which lay not more than two hundred miles farther south. They were traders bringing up a stock to sell to the shore peoples of Ecuador--tribes who had long been compelled to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Incas, but who still lived in virtual independence under their own chiefs. The men on the raft told the Spaniards that the whole interior and the southern coast were inhabited by civilised peoples, subjects of an emperor whose capital was a great city in the mountains hundreds of leagues to the south. Having received this confirmation of their most extravagant hopes, Pizarro and his men pushed on until they nearly reached the northern boundary of Ecuador, not far from the limits of the Inca empire. It was clear, however, that their small force would never be able to cope with the armies of such a power. Almagro went back to Panama for reinforcements, while the indomitable Pizarro landed his already disheartened adventurers on a swampy island where their clothes rotted in the steaming, tropical heat and never-ceasing rain; fevers decimated them, mosquitoes tortured them, and eatable provisions were impossible to obtain. When Almagro reached Panama, the governor flew into a rage on hearing that Pizarro was holding his men against their will, and sent a ship to bring back all who wished. Nine-tenths of the band deserted Pizarro, but he was indomitable and thirteen heroes stood by him in his determination to reach Peru or perish. For weary months he waited for provisions, but the moment they arrived he set off for the south. Within twenty days he and his little band of adventurers reached the Gulf of Guayaquil, four hundred miles farther on, and immediately landed at Tumbez. With their own eyes they saw full confirmation of what the Indians of the raft had told them. Irrigated fields, green with beautiful crops, lined the river bank; eighty thousand people, all comfortably housed, lived in the valley; commerce was flourishing; large temples profusely ornamented with gold and silver testified to wealth and culture; the government was